When the weather is good, the mood of the users is positively affected, with the result that their posts on social media are happier, according to a new international scientific study. Research shows that on the contrary, when it rains a lot, when it is very cold or too hot, then Facebook and Twitter "coagulate" from posts with a negative emotional charge.
Researchers from Spain, the United States and Australia, published in the journal PLoS One, analyzed 2,4 billion posts on Facebook and 1,1 billion on Twitter between 2009-2016, using dedicated software. which sorts posts into emotionally positive or negative depending on the words used. Then, the posts were correlated with the daily meteorological data of each region.
"Our study is the first to observe and measure the relationship between bad weather and the emotional content of Twitter and Facebook posts. "The magnitude of the effect of the weather is so great that it is commensurate with the change in the mood of users after events such as an earthquake or a mass murder at school," said Professor Esteban Moro of the Carlos 3 University in Madrid.
"We found that the way we express ourselves is shaped by the weather. "Adverse weather conditions, such as very low or very high temperatures, high humidity and a lot of cloud cover, have a negative effect on the emotional expression of the posts," said Nick Obradovic, a researcher at MIT's Media Lab.